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jyosim (904245) writes People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match. The report imagines a world in which students can take online courses they assemble themselves from parts they find online: "Much like a playlist on iTunes, a student could pick and choose the elements of a calculus or a biology course offered across the edX platform to meet his or her needs."

The entire point of a university degree is to give you a guided tour of your ignorance. It's not to teach you everything about the subject, it's to tell you everything that you may want to learn within a subject so that you can then pick the bits to study in more detail yourself. If you let students pick the modules that they want, then you may as well just say 'here's a library, go and learn some stuff' and you'll get more or less the same results.

The point of a structured educational degree is to give you a damn well rounded knowledge set of the topic, giving you a reasoned idea why the individual components of the topical area are important as a whole.

Giving students the ability to pick and choose on a much finer basis allows them to potentially learn the mechanics of how to conduct experiments without covering the ethical considerations of conduction experiments. That isn't going to end well...

Sometimes a students individual educational "needs" (rather, the term in the summary is wrong, it should be "wants" - the student "wants" to study the fun stuff, and "wants" to avoid the drudgery) is not the same as the "needs" of society as a whole as society would benefit more from graduates with a well rounded knowledge base rather than an enhanced specialism straight out of university.

Giving students the ability to pick and choose on a much finer basis allows them to potentially learn the mechanics of how to conduct experiments without covering the ethical considerations of conduction experiments. That isn't going to end well...

What astonishing arrogance. So anyone who hasn't taken an ethics course doesn't know right from wrong?

Most of this discussion is just humanities types hyperventilating that their redundant modules are going to be excised from useful disciplines. People get into computer science because they want to learn about computer science, not be force fed sociology as viewed through a Gramscian dialectic.

In software development you need to learn how to program, you don't really need to know how to program in a specific language other than understanding what syntax is. Once you know how to program you can program in most any language with not much more than a quick reference.

I think it may not be as bad as you guys think, depending how this is implemented.

Definitely, especially at the bachelors level, it needs to be a "guided tour" to help students learn about subjects they didn't even know they existed. They need exposure to certain important topics to serve as a base, allowing the student to go forward.

I think where this module idea can help is that, under the current system, you get a very direct track through basic major courses, then a bunch of liberal arts requirements to satisfy (arts, philosophy, etc.). There is not, in my experience, a whole lot of in-major electives. Everyone takes the same track. Degree programs are largely the same across the country.

I firmly believe our future Einsteins will come from the ranks of those trained in interdisciplinary thought -- the people that DON'T just take the same track, but go a little off script too. If a student understands the basic concepts of a field, but doesn't like it, why waste the student's time with more of that just to fit in 3 semester hours of a class to meet a checklist, when the student can switch half way through a semester to another field and see if that is a better fit? As long as the student understands the basics, I see no problem of letting the student explore a little more rather than trapping them in the class for another 6 weeks.

I think this would be the idea of a badges system -- rather than a degree and classes, you get badges when you show levels of mastery in topics (a novice badge, an intermediate badge, master badge, etc.). A bachelors could be awarded when X number of badges are obtained.

Well rounded is not about jack of all trades in your field. It's about exposure to the soft skills needed like communicating to others, economic skills, and triggers for innovation (outside of the box thinking).

For tech/it we have community colleges (or junior colleges or state colleges or whatever non-University places are called where you live) that offer AS degrees. Some University type places also offer BAS - Batchelors of Applied Science - more in-depth tech and hands on, plus a little more gen-ed stuff.

I know it's an exception, but I intentionally picked a school that didn't have a PE requirement, because I knew going in how dumb that was.

As for art history? I took two of those classes, and they were the most interesting, educational, and mind-expanding classes I took. Also, when I ended up doing web development out of college, that little bit of art knowledge may have served to improve my designs, and probably contributed to my ability to get a job with a design firm in the first place. Now, again, I pic

But stuff like needing to take PE classes where 1 CLASS costs way more then buying a 2 YEAR gym membership is not needed.

Also why should have to take art history to work in IT?? art is nice to have but not at that cost.

For tech / IT we need more tech / trade schools.

Also the college time tables suck as well.

IT HAS trade schools. You know them - they're the ones that teach you Java and PHP and all that other stuff. You can learn Cisco, Juniper, Linux, etc in them as well.

That's not a university or college, though, that's a trade.

Just like you have electricians and electrical engineers, one does not replace the other, and both have skills the other doesn't (the EE cannot, for example, wire up a new circuit in a house).

A university or college is used to produce a well-rounded student - someone who can take a problem and decompose it to parts and then figure out a good way to implement them (in Java, or PHP, or Python, or whatever, it doesn't matter), to which they can hand off the solution to someone who knows it better.

PE in university and college? Inactivity, obesity and sedentary lifestyles are a big problem in the western world. Sure you could sign up for a gym membership, but you'd be hard pressed to get a structured environment out of it (most people drop out of a gym membership within a year), so being "forced" to take a PE class may very well be essential. And PE might as well develop the mind further, enhancing student development by seeing parallels between worlds (many serendipitous discoveries have occurred because a problem in one discipline had a solution in an unrelated field).

Art? Geez, humans are creative beings, and sometimes seeing creative output and learning to appreciate them can expand your mind. Heck, if you can't appreciate how people did things without technology in the past, how can you appreciate what technology can do now and in the future? I mean, Michelangelo creating David (a rather large statue in real life) took months to create slowly chipping away at it. And it's worthy of appreciation to see how dedication and hard work produced something so impressive.

Let's just say that people DO appreciate things that look nice. The bondi blue iMac? Geez, that's a rather whimsical thing in an era of beige boxes that were literally boxes. Yes, it can get in the way of practicality, but people generally appreciate form as well as function - they exist as one whole.

If you want to just learn the technical stuff - go right ahead, there are plenty of trade schools to do just that. But if you want to get the mots out of university or college, the soft skills to balance the hard technical stuff are what techies really need to concentrate on. Because really, when you think about it, we techies haven't evolved much social skills over say, general laborers on a construction site.

Dear lord, I hate working with people who are "specialized". They don't seem to grasp how their decisions will affect others above or below them. They're a great bank of knowledge for what they focus on, but they have a hard time applying their knowledge in a useful way because they don't understand how their knowledge fits in the grand scheme of things.

This is especially important when talking about computer systems. You get someone who knows about databases and can tell you the optimal page size for a c

I'd reply to you, but I'm busy signing up for a module on "Page Size Optimization for Specialized IO Systems", it seems to have been a weak point in my Master's program, and an "Intro to Systems Analysis for Database Administrator's" module.

As the other poster says, well rounded is not jack of all trades, its just well rounded in what you do - so a web developer knows about HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS, the Dom, interacting with the server side, and the various aspects of the server side part of the equation, so how to handle requests, state, database accesses, design patterns, data structures etc etc.

What I fear MIT will do is producing someone who graduates from their Web Developer course being absolutely excellent in HTMl, JS etc but knows sod all about caching, state management, design patterns, UX etc.

The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago. Specialization and people who are that passionate and WELL educated (have become "gurus") about specific areas are what is valuable today.

Specialization with no understanding of topics outside of the area of specialty is Not-A-Good-Thing (tm). Specialization is important and obviously useful but there are plenty of cases where a generalist is more useful. You need people who can see how parts of a business fit together and can fill in roles that may don't justify hiring a dedicated specialist. The bigger or more specialized the company, the greater the need for specialists but he need for generalists never goes away, particularly if you want good managers. Technical specialists as a crude rule of thumb tend to run into their Peter Principle limit a lot sooner.

I'm not an IT guy per-se but I often am asked to fill that role. I'm have the skill set of a generalist. You can find better IT guys than me but you aren't likely to find IT guys that are also certified accountants or non-IT engineers of which I am both. In my company our IT needs are relatively modest so hiring a dedicated IT guy doesn't make sense right now. As we grow that will (hopefully) change. On a weekly basis I handle work in IT, HR, engineering, accounting and purchasing. Someone who only is an IT guy would undoubtedly do a great job with the IT stuff but might struggle with stuff outside his/her specialty. The important thing for a generalist to understand is where his limits are and to not exceed them. I know a lot about IT but the most important thing for me to know is to know what I don't know.

Hmmm... let's see. The English classes I took help me write on a daily basis. Accounting came in handy when I worked for a non-profit that had to do fund raising; I use Psychology, Sociology, and Political Science daily; the art classes I look help me judge the usability of web sites, I took Differential Equations which came in handy when I worked for an Environmental Engineering firm, foreign languages gave me a better grasp of grammar and and foreign cultures, my Physics classes give be a better grasp on electrical and electronics concepts (which is handy if you want to work with hardware), Statistics comes in handy when I have to prepare quantitative reports, and Chemistry was also good to have when I worked for an Environmental Engineering firm.

None of those were 'core' classes but the fulfilled part of my graduation requirements. You had to have a certain amount of hours in Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Arts, and Literature at my Uni. I would probably not have studied them unless I had been told to. A well rounded education is priceless.

I was talking with a friend who recently went back to school. He has a degree which doesn't remotely relate to anything he wants to do, and decided that he wanted a computer science degree. But then he shifted gears - he was saying "I could stop after getting the minor, and save all the extra money from the additional year I'd have to go". His logic is that all the interviews he's gone to have asked him whether he's had SQL, Unix, etc. experience. Now that he's been exposed to those, he figures that's

The entire point of a university degree is to give you a guided tour of your ignorance. It's not to teach you everything about the subject, it's to tell you everything that you may want to learn within a subject so that you can then pick the bits to study in more detail yourself. If you let students pick the modules that they want, then you may as well just say 'here's a library, go and learn some stuff' and you'll get more or less the same results.

But then you actually arrive at college, and as part of your degree in comsci, you're required to take an accounting class. During that 12 week class you spend about a week learning a couple of formulas that you realize will be very helpful when coding accounting software, but just as you're getting into it they switch topics and start teaching you about business management and then spend 4 weeks on "How to use Excel"...

Wouldn't it be great if you could change the focus of that class to the fundamental math functions you'll be using frequently in your future career and avoid the bits of the class that will have nothing to do with your profession?...and that's the point...

Wouldn't it be great if you could change the focus of that class to the fundamental math functions you'll be using frequently in your future career and avoid the bits of the class that will have nothing to do with your profession?

You do understand the idea of a liberal arts education, right? There's a very good argument to look at coding as a trade [wsj.com], but that's not what universities are for. If you want to be educated like a plumber, go to a trade school.

Sadly, a lot of people seem to want colleges and universities to be turned into half-assed trade schools, rather than just going to an actual trade school. I don't know why. But that's exactly what's going to happen with all this "Everybody's gotta go to college so they can get a job!" nonsense that's been going around.

In the specific example given there's arguably a complaint to be made because someone wanted a CS focus and got an exciting month on 'clicking buttons in Office 2007', which is at least as narrowly vocational, likely more, and not the right vocation.

Schools can, and do, have courses and course requirements that just aren't very good at delivering what they are supposed to. I suspect that dithering about whether they want to be trade schools or not can help cause this; but complaining about it isn't reall

Thing is, these 'modules' will not actually help there. All they are really talking about is shorter courses. Many (most?) universities already have structures in place for 4-6 week courses (usually over summers) that function like this, but chopping up the coursework into a bunch of smaller pieces really does not solve any underlying problems of individual courses being well suited or not.

Obviously. But then we end up with a bunch of people who expect colleges and universities to be like trade schools, making it more difficult for people who care about education to get one from those places.

The companies are too greedy and lazy to be expected to train their own employers or even test people properly, so we need to stop handing out loans and grants to people who simply should not go to college or university, or come up with some scheme that will help with that.

You do understand the concept of broad base of knowledge to operate from, correct? It's a liberal arts education; not all will be useful, some will be. They used to have a term for it; renaissance man (or woman, you know, whatever).

Yep, you as a mild-mannered undergraduate are able to leap tall theories, run faster than a locomotive, and who, disguised as beguiling innocent, are able to use your Super-XRay vision to totally predict your future life. Let no man in the organizations you work for attempt to get you to contribute to areas not in your chosen field of tunnel vision. There hasn't been a subject yet devised that could aid your future self in ways you cannot predict.

huh see thats exactly how my Univ worked. Then again I went to a practical college not a Liberal arts college. There is pretty good size difference between the 2 which is why I picked RIT.
This seems to be pretty light on frivolous classes.
First Year
ACSC-101 YearOne 0
CSCI-141 Computer Science I 4
MATH-181, 182 LAS Perspective 7A, 7B: Project-based Calculus I, II 8
LAS Foundation 1: First Year Seminar 3
LAS Perspective 2, 3, 4 9
CSCI-142 Computer Science II 4
MATH-190 Discrete Mathematics for Co

Exactly my thoughts. Students do not know what to pick and certainly not on a detail level. That they (well, some of them) will be able to do so after graduation is one of the central aims of a university program.

That is entirely not the point of a university degree, especially at lower levels.

Bachelors -- are you able to learn and apply basic conceptsMasters -- are you able to learn and apply advanced conceptsPhD -- are you able to discover novel, interesting concepts

And (of course) modules would have prerequisites (just like courses do now) to ensure that an adequate understanding of necessary basic concepts has been obtained.

Finally, some of the most influential people in history were thrown in a library and self-educated. Leibniz, for one. I'm more concerned with their motives; education has been commercialized in the US and this could be a way to allow indecisive students to register for fewer courses, taking longer to complete a degree and adding wealth to the university's coffers.

The idea seems foolish to me, personally, because students already have this ability. It's called attendance.

MIT has been doing a great job of educating the type of youth that craves education. They should stick to their method. So very often the subject a student hates the most just happens to be the subject the student needs the most. A course in touch typing would have been good for me in grade school but I loathed the idea of such a boring course. These days the degree of learning that an MIT student needs is almost impossible to reach. Fortunately there are a few young people who enjoy getting half

Exactly. College shouldn't just teach you what you know you don't know. It's also supposed to teach you what you don't know you don't know.

Well, that really happened for me. I had no clue something like NP-Complete or the Chomsky Hierarchy of grammars (and how it relates to programming) could even exist, or even how to go about discovering its existence. College introduced me to those things (and more).

Exactly this. When I went into college, I was convinced that I'd major in physics and minor in math. There was no question in my mind. I took a computer science course because it seemed like the best option on the list of required courses. My second semester in college, I hit into Quantum Mechanics and found myself struggling. As much as I liked physics, I couldn't wrap my head around the equations and was NOT enjoying it at all. Meanwhile, in my computer science course, I was barely paying attention

Yep, idiots. This looks like MIT's marketing department is running their learning programmes now, like the tail wagging the dog. I've seen this happen to a certain degree in other universities; marketing decide that they can sell more courses/get more students if they shorten courses to 7 weeks. They halve the learning targets and distribute them across twice as many courses.

What's wrong with that? Well for starters, it means that twice as much course time is taken up with introducing the course at the begi

The entire point of a university degree is to give you a guided tour of your ignorance.

I heartily disagree. The "point" of a degree is subjective. Each student can have a different reason for pursuing a degree, each professor a different reason for teaching, each parent a different reason for paying for it, etc.

So any argument premised on there being just one "point" for a degree seems flawed from the start.

University is what you make of it. If you go in with the attitude that you are just paying for a name and otherwise are in a social club then that is all you get out of it. If you go in with the plan of utilizing the resources, the professors with years or decades of experience, the research labs, etc, those things can really pay off if you will work with them. If the education itself is just that personal experience, save the money and open up a seat for someone else who will actually make use of the ed

There are some people that can do this successfully, but it is rare. Even for those that can, things do often not work out so well with larger gaps in areas that they never got around to looking at or missing basic stuff. Still, for some this is the best way to do things.

Personally, I went to courses, checked whether the lectures added value and if not, I learned the material by myself and only attended the exam. For about 80% of the courses, being there physically was worthwhile.

Personally I took the here's a library, then went and learned some stuff method.It has worked out for me.

You're not typical. The typical college student (even at MIT), when presented with a completed unstructured program, will get lost in the mire. And you're not going to become very educated if you spend all your days smoking weed, playing Xbox, and working on some vague project for Maker Faire that you're never going to actually finish. Making kids take structured classes may not be cool or hip, but it's necessary.

This sounds to me exactly like one of those dumbass marketing meetings where some idiot gives a

Over the years I have more and more avoided the 'self taught' programmers, and I have found I am not alone in this. Too many seem to capitalize on anti-intellectual mythology and resonate better with management which leads to advancement since they have a very confident narrative.. but they tend to have less awareness of what they do not know and fellow (often less paid) programmers have to work harder to compensate for them. Their strength often seem to lay in social skills and image rather then technic

So what happened prior to those 10 years? If I did not have my current background I would not recognize how many bad ideas under new names are constantly being recycled and see enough parallels between "ground breaking paradigm shifting!" new tech and the basics I learned in school, about things invented in the 60's and 70's, to rarely even crack a manual. Usually I only read manuals and forums when I think a feature is broken to ensure I have a good idea of its capabilities.

Well, with the cretinization of IT that has been going on, sure. Whether a Java programmer has no clue after a conventional university college/program or a after this thing does not really matter. The "no clue" is what matters and the market seems to be going for that.

I remember going into Manchester University / MMU/ Salford. (MA courses)
The course I was looking at had 2 out of 8 core modules the other 6(+2 if you wanted) were electives and depending on the combination that you chose your masters qualification would be named differently, it could change from MSc to MA or MEd.

Why is everyone assuming this is an all-or-nothing proposition and picking the worst possible cases as a counterargument? I don't decide a spoon is useless because it does a terrible job at cutting steak. You should evaluate this idea based on whether it can improve education if applied judiciously, not focus on the cases where it won't help or could even hurt.

Being able to mix and match partial-semester courses doesn't mean every course needs to be mix and match. Certainly required sequential core su

My actual position [slashdot.org] is more along the line of agreement, in principle. Nothing requires that A Course Shall Be Of Semester Length. My own experience with quarters was positive and I'd imagine that other lengths could suit different topics.

The puff about 'like an itunes playlist! Who reads things where you have to turn pages?' was just so insufferable, though, that I couldn't help but unhinge my mandibles and spit acidic bile at it. Such a painful analogy.

It sounds superficially appealing, letting people choose what interests them or what they think they need to learn. But there's a couple of problems.

Firstly, if we stick with the music analogy, how many artists or tracks have you discovered by random, and in doing so expanded your listening choices?

Also, if you follow a well-structured course, you're getting what a subject-matter expert knows from experience you need to learn. Case in point, I would not have studied stats by choice, but now I'm damn glad it was hammered into me.

The poor courses I've seen were not so much hampered by the format, more either by sub-par lecturers and/or poor, outdated materials.

Case in point, I would not have studied stats by choice, but now I'm damn glad it was hammered into me.

I would not have studied stats by choice, either. I'm damn glad I passed, but I core dumped 99.99% of it after passing. I haven't had a need for it since, so it was a complete waste of time and money.

I also wouldn't have studied much math, either, while in college. That was hammered into me, though, and it has proved itself to be completely useless to me as a software developer. That is, until I decided that I wanted to learn 3D game programming. Then I bought some books on 3D math, learned Linear Alge

I would not have studied stats by choice, either. I'm damn glad I passed, but I core dumped 99.99% of it after passing. I haven't had a need for it since, so it was a complete waste of time and money.

"Complete waste"? I assume you at least retain some of the basic concepts, like knowing the difference between a mean and median, understanding the kind of stuff that goes into measuring whether something is significant, calculating a trend, etc. (even if you don't remember the specific methodologies for doing it). If the course was taught well, you presumably came away with at least some idea of how statistics and graphs can be misinterpreted and/or deliberately used to manipulate people -- which (to my

Courses serve a purpose that customized "modules" do not, will not, and can not - They force you to learn the less "fun" parts required to properly understand the material you want to learn. If you allow students to only eat ham cubes, they'll never touch the broccoli. If you don't take five ranks in metallurgy, you can't open the "intelligent liquid metal" skill tree.

Realistically, this would mean they'll just require a long chain of prerequisite "modules" for anything students actually want to take. Almost like structuring "modules" in to a "course" - Imagine that! Except, without the advantage of having a single professor aware of your progress through each step. You think the current semester-long course structure has a lot of duplication? Wait until each module needs to basically spend the first half making sure you actually know the half a dozen prerequisites, and still remember it enough to apply to the present topic. "Oh, yeah, I took module X two years ago to get into module Z. Something about derivatives, IIRC... Don't worry, I have it!"

Given that you usually take your choice of courses(subject to certain constraints depending on the degree you want to go for) a 'course' is a 'module', just not a terribly granular one.

And there is room to tinker with granularity, some schools already run on quarters rather than semesters without apparent incident(at least in my experience quarters are nice for 'niche' things that you want to take a look at, because you get three per academic year rather than two and the proximity of midterms and finals did focus one's attentions a bit; but what you did in three sequential courses for, say, 'a year of calculus' was pretty much identical to what you would take in two sequential courses at a semester school); but the idea that online attention spans prove that knowledge is fundamentally fine-grained...not as much.

Very much this. I personally delayed learning some things that are important for over 20 years because they were not fun. Fortunately only minor things, but in retrospect I shudder to think what I would probably have skipped if everything had been elective in small bits.

FTA: But the professors on the MIT committee that drafted the report argue that the numbers show that larger percentages explored significant parts of courses, which may be all they wanted or needed. "This in many ways mirrors the preferences of students on campus," they wrote. "In a survey of students, approximately 40 percent of respondents report that they have taken MIT classes that they feel would benefit from modularizati

I actually did know a guy in college who majored in "science". Specifically, he was crazy intense and managed to swing a double major in physics and biochem, but we all just joked that he was majoring in "science".

Listen, for the rest of MIT's history, the experience for the core students on campus will remain the same: Dorms, semesters, course sequences, grades/evaluations, professors in classrooms, papers, projects, parties, etc.. Why am I so sure? Because MIT is an elite school, and elites will want their kids to get the classical education which made them elite. It's just as much about soaking in the culture, encountering other people, putting together a study crew, a party crew, having a shared experience that i

While students at MIT and Harvard do cross-register, the logistics of travel from one campus to another limit the extent to which this is practical. Online makes it possible for students to take classes from across universities more conveniently.”

Then you won't be saving time, or money, commuting between MIT and Harvard by using your own private car. My point had to do with the proximity of the two universities and what realistic, low cost, and frequent transportation options between classes exist, relative to the text of the article; and I provided citations for others.

my experience with the NYC subway system tells me that if I'm relying on the subway to get me between classes, forget it. Bad enough on one campus if a teacher goes long or has to talk after class I might not have enough time to run across campus and make it to my next class.

So, it's not just, "I won't use public transport" it seems more like the case that juggling two disparate school schedules IS a logistical hassle. I mean, if you got lucky and a class at MIT starts an hour or two after a class you're t

While students at MIT and Harvard do cross-register, the logistics of travel from one campus to another limit the extent to which this is practical. Online makes it possible for students to take classes from across universities more conveniently.”

Yes, it is two subway stops. And about 30 minutes of transit time each way, once you factor in the time to walk to and from the subway stations, the unpredictability of the Red Line frequency (although I must admit it has gotten heapsload better in the last few years; and major kudos to that skunk works project that brought the T administration kicking and screaming into the 20th -- yes 20th -- century by implementing time-to-next-train displays). While not an insurmountable impediment, it does mean that

Even if you were to adopt this more modular structure (which just seems to me like you'd be picking 12 'things' a semester instead of 4-5), the business model breaks down if you use it universally. After all, the student might not have to waste two years taking all these classes they don't want to (that are irrelevant to their major). Mechanical Engineering major? Go take Accounting 101 with all the morons from the football team. Business major? You certainly need two semesters of chemistry. Unemployab^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Art history major? Go take Rocks for Jocks.

My view of university education (having an MSc, a separate BSc, and a PhD) has always been that up until MSc (or until BSc, that very much depends on the country and on the followed traditions of education) the point is to get a fairly diverse _introduction_ into as many related [to your main subject] topics as possible, from people who are somewhat knowledgeable in the area, with more deeper knowledge in a lower number of specific areas. Not to make you a jack-of-all-trades in CS for example, but to prepar

Most schools have this already, essentially. It's called a liberal arts degree, or a Board of Trustees degree, if they want it to sound official.

You pick courses that you want to take, take X amount of hours and are awarded a degree. In theory, students specialize in areas the school doesn't offer degrees in, to thereby personalize their education that much further.

In reality it is a junk degree awarded to D students and sports players who don't want to take anything above a 300 level course.

90% of what they teach you in any University or College is useless drivel. I mean did I really NEED to take sociology? An a la carte option would have appealed to me way back then.

When a person is highly focused, and wishes to take only classes that are relevant, trade schools are a better option.

Another option might be to be an "Adult returning student". I did that at my University, and a lot of the courses required of normal students were not needed.

The bad part of the highly focused education is that do we know at 18 our entire career path? I went through many different "careers" - although mostly in one place - and was surprised how many things I didn't think had much relevan

The core courses- math, physics, and chemistry- cover prettymuch the same material as the 1970s. The style of teaching has changed. Firs they tried "activity-based" teaching like labs or clickers. Now courses are "flipped" watching the lecture videos at home and doing homework problems in class.

From 1970 to 2010, required for all CS degrees, and after 1980 all EE degrees. The explanation was to teach algorithms, not latest fad-itern language. Nearly all the powerful faculty pushing LISP have retired. The new introductory language is a variant of Python.

Nearly all the languages used in my MIT courses decades ago are pretty much gone, save LISP. These include APL, PL/I, AS-360. You learn how to learn instead.

Look, obviously material has to be divided into certain size chunks for it to work in a formal setting. Previously the most efficient chunk size was the term or semester. That's not because it was optimal for the student though, it was optimal for the university due to the overhead of organizing the whole thing. Now that we have more technology the overhead has become lower and it's possible to use a smaller chunk size that's more optimal for students. I'm not seeing a lot of downside there.

The duration of a semester *does* put some strange, artificial restrictions on classes. In the introductory physics classes I teach, we have two big units during the course of the year—mechanics, and electricity & magnetism—but there are also smaller topics which get shoehorned in wherever there's room in the schedule: waves, optics, thermodynamics. Then there's topics I never have time for, like relativity. If we had more flexibility in course length, we could set up those extra topics a

cable thing is different the sports channels have high costs meny times more then the other channels we at least want ESPN / FS1 / NBCSN / ect's and other RSN's to get in there own pack and not in the basic pack. Most channels cost $0.20 or less per sub.

University classes cost the same and unlike cable they force to take stuff you really don't want vs having it but not tuning in to it. If schools still made you do the same time / hours but let say dump the filler / fluff classes and take more classes in you